Neighborhood policing in Paris from Old Regime to Revolution: the exercise of authority by the District de Saint-Roch, 1789-1791

The reputation and supposed significance of the Parisian districts of 1789–1790, formed to elect delegates to the Estates-General, and transformed by revolution into organs of local democratic power, suffered a classic rise and fall in the latter half of the twentieth century. Considered not even worthy of an index entry in George Rudé’s classic 1959 study of Parisian popular protest, they were passed over for reasons of strict chronology by Albert Soboul’s simultaneously researched account of the ‘‘popularmovement’’ of the sansculottes. As Soboul rose to dominance, however, historians sought to extend his model of the essential merits of the local Parisian activists back in time, and the late 1970s and early 1980s saw a series of publications that took the districts as their explicit focus, placing them in a narrative of ever-present, but accelerating, virtuous radicalism. For Maurice Genty, the districts were the first step in a revolutionary apprenticeship in democracy, while for R. B. Rose, they were the start of a movement that led directly to the ‘‘making’’ of the sansculottes—in their soboulien idealized sense.